Jim Pillsbury's Web Blog

Friday, June 12, 2009

Coming down the pike.....

The next few weeks will be historic in many ways. Elections in Iran may force the price of crude past 80 bucks a barrel, and I thought 3.00 a gallon for gas on July 4th was going to be outrageous... throw on 19 cents tax increase a gallon and we are 3.50 by late summer.

Deval sends cigars and flowers to DeLeo and Murray and is now in violation of their own ethics rules.... you gota love this... the flowers can't be the ones we buy at Alston Cambridge exit off the Pike from homeless guys.. no.... they have to be over 50 bucks... and you bet those cigars are more Cuban related than Virginia.

The rumor is that servicemen and women who were forced to re-up past their enlisted dates could get 500.00 a month for every month they were forced to stay... retro back to 9-11. This is the fairest proposal I've ever seen for the young vets who have been deployed multiple times, now in multiple wars.

Banning texting and non hands free cell phones is coming and none to soon. Every day now while driving I run into, or get behind or almost get run into and see just how bad it's gotten. Young more so than older, I guess we have less to say or be heard, are endangering us all.

And while we demand ethics and transportation reforms, that must be done in the next few weeks, ALL of the State House deliberations are behind closed doors and most rank and file house and senate members are also excluded. The system of secrecy will be something that is used against most of them next year in the election.

The FDA is going to be in the business of regulating tobacco. More information for us to read on the package, we will know now, exactly what other chemicals are put into the cigs, harder to find places that sell them and scientific evaluation of smoke free products will begin very soon. Funny though, they pass over menthol... an additive to Newports that are favored by our African American brothers and sisters. It's about time the FDA regulated this drug as they do with any other known health risk. History shows us, we just can't rely on the tobacco companies to police themselves and not make smoking worse than it really is, by adding known carcinogens. Greed and denial on the cigarette manufactures side forced the FDA to step in along with a trying to quit President, a dying senior Senator and more well meaning, but zealot anti smoking do gooders. Humans smoked tobacco long ago and survived. But they didn't smoke as much as we do and it certainly didn't have added chemicals in it.